Hilary Cunningham Scharper

Canadian author Hilary Scharper.

Hilary Cunningham Scharper is a novelist and associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. Scharper’s fiction, academic writing, teaching and research focus on cultural approaches to Nature. She describes her fiction as Ecogothic:[1] a new and emerging literary genre that builds on elements of traditional Gothic fiction,[2] but highlights human-nature relationships.

Her Work

Nature, the Gothic and the Ecogothic

Nature and the nonhuman take many unconventional forms in the Gothic—there are forests who can be both sinister and sublime. Ivy-covered ruins who eye strangers with suspicion. Hybrid creatures hiding out among the aristocracy...and in cemeteries. Not to mention all kinds of metaphysical spaces and creatures who confound and upset what is taken for granted in the so-called "real world."

As a literary genre, the Gothic takes special delight in challenging taken-for-granted binaries or dualisms. These include binaries such as the distinction between: the living and the dead, humans and animals, culture and nature, objects and subjects, the mechanical and the organic, good and evil, to name but a few.

The Ecogothic highlights what might be called "off-the-beaten-trail" relationships between humans and the natural world—that is, relationships that are rarely spoken of, or often suppressed, owing to the privileging of "rational thought" in much of western culture. As a result, the genre gives voice to the deep, complicated and often contradictory feelings humans experience in these relationships, including both intense love as well as intense fear; profound companionship as well as profound estrangement. Building on the idea that the universe is "a communion of subjects" rather than "a collection of objects," the Ecogothic genre underscores human-nature encounters as vibrant and dynamic—but also tricky and open-ended.

Scharper locates her stories at the "wild edges" or "margins" of both wilderness and urban landscapes, tracing out the complex relationships that characterize human and nonhuman encounters. She explores Gothic nature as places of "yearning" and "refusal"—that is, as places of love and intimacy as well anxiety and estrangement between human and non-human characters. For Scharper, it is in these moments of yielding and love, fear and estrangement that one finds evidence of "biophilia," a quality or force which draws all living things to each other and into contingent inter-relationship.

Nature that is morally complex....

Scharper's first novel, Perdita, is set at a late 19th-century lighthouse on the Bruce Peninsula in northern Ontario, Canada. For 19-year-old Marged Brice, Nature is both an "other" and "another," i.e., a living, acting, creating Nature "who" is not only capable of influencing events though the creation of weather (one of its main forms of expression), but is also noble, reckless, forgiving and jealous. Marged's Nature is therefore not merely a landscape in the traditional sense, but a world of morally-complex players who will sometimes act as background and foreground, but are nevertheless always between, amidst, and enveloping. Marged probes her unique relationship with Nature in a series of diaries and these resurface in the 21st century to complicate the world of a historian who is on a mission to find the oldest living people on the planet. A ghostly, gothic hybrid—the figure of a lost child or a "Perdita"—ultimately brings the two time periods together.

Following the lead of novelist Angela Carter—who noted that the Gothic "retains a singular moral function: that of provoking unease"[3]—Scharper explores a wide range of affective relationships with Nature in order to challenge simple and objectifying approaches to the natural world.

Fin-de-Cene and the Anthropocene

Additionally, Scharper has suggested that the Ecogothic should be thought of as a fin-de-cene—rather than a fin-de-siècle—literary genre. While literary scholars have often noted the Gothic’s association with crises in social identity (especially those occurring during the transition from one century to the next),[4] Scharper has suggested that—ecologically-speaking—it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning from one geological epoch to the next. As we shift from the current Holocene to an Anthropocene (i.e., an era in which human activities have a primary and extensive impact on the earth’s systems), the Ecogothic is relevant to a society facing the need to forge more intimate, imaginative and sustainable relationships with Nature. In this respect, she joins ecocritics and literary scholars Andrew Smith and William Hughes in their efforts to situate the Ecogothic" at the intersection of "literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process".[5]

Research

Hilary Scharper is also a professor of cultural anthropology. Her academic work explores boundary-making as itself a multi-faceted encounter with "nature"—one which ultimately generates certain types of human-nature interactions while excluding or marginalizing other kinds. Because "borders" can encompass physical spaces, metaphysical categories, ecological zones, as well as human and non-human actors, Hilary focuses on "nature" itself as a kind of borderscape. To probe notions of "nature" and the "natural," then—whether at an international border wall, in laws regulating human-animal interactions or in philosophical discussions of what it means to be human—is to critically question acts of enclosure, crossings and mobilities.

Selected Works

Fiction

Non-fiction

External links

References

  1. ↑ "The Eco-Gothic"
  2. ↑ "Gothic Novel"
  3. ↑ Frayling, Christopher (2006). The Gothic Reader: A Critical Anthology. London: Tate Publishing. p. 14. ISBN 1-85437-599-7.
  4. ↑ "Introduction." Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Roger Luckhurst, ed. Oxford World Classics. 2009.
  5. ↑ "Ecogothic." Edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Manchester University Press, 2013.
  6. ↑ University of Toronto Anthropology Department
  7. ↑ Hilary Scharper’s website
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